Toshiba has made OEM SSDs for a number of companies, and there are a number of companies (Dell and Lenovo, notably) who source SSDs from multiple companies and in some cases (especially Dell!) two of the same model of machine ordered at roughly the same time can come with two different manufacturers SSDs (often with a Dell label stuck on them such that you need to actually plug them in and check what the BIOS or OS says it is.

I don't keep track of Apple stuff, so I can't comment on who they use for their SSD suppliers.

The model you link to is are the SSD models I saw a brief positive review of, but again, it's a bummer that there isn't a more comprehensive one on Anandtech.

mSATA is nice, if you need more space and want to go the one-of-each approach, or if you want two SSDs and don't have an optical drive you can swap out for one.

In theory, yes. In practice, as I said up-thread, it is totally unnecessary for a regular user to worry about write lifetime. Even with write amplification, and lower lifetimes on smaller flash nodes, you would have to write the entire size of the drive out daily day in and day out in order to worry about write lifetime going in a couple of years.

Write slowdowns when full are a bigger issue than lifetime.

The second reply brings up some very good points: with the exception of turning AHCI on if it is not enabled, most of the guide is dangerous and unnecessary. Windows 7 should do all the tuning needed to get good performance out of an SSD under normal workloads.

Assuming you have the time and expertise to do it; it's not hard, as long as your hardware is pretty standard. For the X201, Lenovo has a very nice software update tool which will install all the Lenovo-specific software and drivers once the machine is on the net (which may require manually adding a NIC or WLAN driver); I highly recommend it.

An on-site external drive is not a backup plan, at least for a desktop (one sitting at home is, arguably, a good first-step backup plan for laptops used on the road.)

I don't use cloud backup for much; I have a RAIDed server at home, which serves as a backup for my laptops. The most critical terabyte or so of files are on two off-site external drives, one in my bank safety deposit box, and one at my inlaws' house 300 miles away. A couple gigs of the most critical files are mirrored between Google Drive and Dropbox, but that's a drop in the bucket of the family photos.

Now that flickr's gone to 1TB free, I may dump them all up there.

nkedel,

What effect does using Bitblocker to encrypt an SSD have that is different from a HDD and should that affect the choice of which SSD to buy?

My employer will not provide SSDs in their standard issue Thinkpads but will allow us to put in our own.

Thanks.

There are two differences, one general, one specific to sandforce-based drives, although I will explain them below pretty much purely for interest. As a punch-line most users shouldn't worry about it, and most will not notice at all.

1) For all SSDs, Bitlocker will do a one-time pass of filling the empty drive with encrypted "junk" so that it's not clear what's in use vs. not in use. Because this makes the entire drive seem "full" to the SSD controller, there can be some slowdown. It is generally not enough to worry about for general use -- it's still a lot faster than a hard drive, and AFAICT it still plays nicely with TRIM, etc -- but it may be worth leaving some unpartitioned space to increase the spare area if write performance is at a premium (eg, if you have a 480gb drive -- which comes out as about 450 usable in Windows, thanks to drive-manufacturers using 10**9 for a gigabyte, and Windows and everyone else using 2**30 -- maybe partition 425 rather than the full 450.

2) For drives with a Sandforce controller, the use of Bitlocker means you will get no benefit from the built-in compression. They're still pretty fast, and you're unlikely to notice the difference with the better models (using sync or toggle flash), but once again if write performance is at a premium, this can be an issue (and the cheapest models with async flash are definitely best avoided with this one.)

In terms of buying drives for it, I'd still go on reliability first, but that might swing the recommendation to Samsung over the Intel 520s given that the latter have a Sandforce controller. We've deployed a ton of laptops with the Intel 520s (and before that OCZ Vertex 3 and Deneva 2, also Sandforce-based) and bitlocker, and I've never heard of a reaction other than "wow, this is really fast" (often even compared to an older-generation Intel or Toshiba SSD, rather than just against disk.)

There's also one other point I should make: almost nobody will do this frequently enough to care, but because there are a few crazy people out there... blowing away your system and doing a fresh install with bitlocker -- or switching between encrypted and unencrypted repeatedly -- will overwrite the entire drive every time. Done once, twice, a handful of times isn't going to matter in the slightest, but done repeatedly over long periods of time this is one of the few "abusive workloads" which could prematurely wear out the drive.

I mention the above given a thread I saw elsewhere suggesting that someone should encrypt their drive before every time they went outside the US, and then decrypted it when they came back. Don't do that with an SSD, at least if you're going out of the US regularly.

Also as an aside regarding Bitlocker -- it has a bigger CPU performance hit on older CPUs -- Sandy-Bridge and newer machines (eg anything in the X220/T420/W520 generation or newer), barring some some lower-end CPUs have the "AES-NI" feature which makes the computational cost of the encryption almost free.

Thanks, nkedel. I've been using Intel SSDs at home but will likely get a Samsung for work.

I've also confirmed that the CPU is an i5-520M that does support AES-NI

He'll have to turn on AHCI in the BIOS in some laptops so that the TRIM function is supported.

I'm glad to hear that's got AES-NI, and that my memory was incorrect about it starting with the Sandy Bridge machines.

With luck, the X201 will have come with it on -- turning on AHCI in the BIOS is easy, but Windows does not always play well with that change having been made. When it works, it "just works" but when it doesn't, doing the switch involves a couple of reboots and a couple of registry changes which -- while not rocket surgery -- aren't the most comfortable things for non-technical users to mess with.

Also, more than a few laptops (including my most recent HP) don't include an AHCI switch in the BIOS.

That can happen either if it's too old (no AHCI support) or too new (no legacy option -- which will either be AHCI or RAID/IRRT, either of which is fine.)

AHCI came in at the same time as chipsets intended for the Core 2 processors (the "965" chipsets) and the ability to use a full 4GB of memory as opposed to maxing out at 3.25GB-3.5GB (as in the last-genertion Pentium 4 and Pentium M/Core Duo laptops/boards, the "945" chipsets.)

On laptops, main "too old" case will be netbooks; AHCI will be on mainstream notebooks from mid-2007 and newer, but plenty of netbooks (and larger-than-netbook machines with Atom processors) as late as 2010[*] still use non-AHCI-capable chipsets.

(* and could be later for all I know -- that's when I started saying "forget it, these things are too slow even for casual use, don't buy 'em" and stopped following them.)

Of course, I'm sure there are some exceptions, especially in the 2007-2009 Core 2s, where there was a slightly broader variety of chipsets out there. Since going to the onboard GPU and memory controller on the i3/i5/i7 chips, there has not been much variation in Intel chipsets, and AMD has been so far behind on their laptop CPUs that they've not been very appealing to anyone except at a few odd corners of the market.